Surprising Entrepreneur Facts

We often look at titans of business and wonder how they got to where they are today. And, indeed, it really is interesting when you begin to look at entrepreneurs and study them. For the most part, many entrepreneurs started out as surprisingly…ordinary…people. OnStartups offers these 12 interesting facts about entrepreneurs:

1. The average median age of company founders when they started their current company is 40.
2. 95.1% have bachelor degrees, and 47% have advanced degrees.
3. Less than 1% have extremely rich or extremely poor backgrounds. They are mostly somewhere in the middle.
4. 15.2% have siblings that started a business previously.
5. 69.9% are married when they start a first business. (5.2% are divorced, separated or widowed.)
6. 59.7% have at least one child upon launching their first business.
7. Most entrepreneurs are serial business-starters — meaning that they launch more than one business over their lifetimes.
8. 74.8% see building wealth as a motivator to become an entrepreneur.
9. Only 4.5% start a business because they are having trouble with traditional employment.
10. Entrepreneurs often have better educations than their parents.
11. 51.9% of entrepreneurs are the first in their family to launch a business.
12. 75.4% work at other companies for about six years before launching their own business.

Image source: ShashiBellamkonda via Flickr